Preserved Wook is an oldtime New England railway engineman who calls to life again the history & technology not only of the steam locomotive in the LAST Steam Age of the Old Atlantic West, but of many a wonderful way of getting around in the World, in a better time when travel indeed was for the few…and the very few!

Virginian AE Class 2-10-10-2 Locomotives

The quest by Engineman Preserved Wook and everybody else and their brother to identify the American steam locomotive with specifically the most tractive power bids fair to be, well, mainly sort of unending. Here is tonight’s find by me to cloud the issue some more, from the pp of steamlocomotive.com!

The 48″ low pressure cylinders were the largest on any US steam locomotive, the drivers were only fifty-six inches — not a highspeed design at all — and the rig was so long dinky tenders likewise had to be used, so the whole shebang would still fit onto the Virginian turntables. As a workhorse, this girl could lug the whole shitaree – coal drags – along at about eight miles per, and the rest of the figures may be read at the above link. The RR kept her and her sisters on until 1952, so slow & good was evidently deemed to be better than fast & loose anchors, spikes and tie plates!

This fellow, Smith, is embarrassed at present for haring off on the tractive effort path, as he has just been reading that in fact the /weight per driver/ is the actual factor in locomotive effective power — it is /weight/ that decides how much one may open the throttle and hope to get anywhere without the drivers slipping.

Only to that degree can the most optimistic engineman expect to exert draught and begin to impart a vector of radial momentum to inertial mass. Otherwise, the waggons will all simply sit inertly there, smiling up like Mr Toad’s shirts, from out of the laundry tub of the local